1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE

The Essential 100, No. 48: Colossal Cave Adventure

Cover Story: How Will Crowther's humble project proved that video games could do anything.

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s 1UP soldiers on with our Essential 100 series, I've noticed a certain misconception about the ranking of our chosen games. So, allow me to put you at ease: a higher-ranked title isn't necessarily better than those that came before it, just more influential to the medium as a whole. And there's no greater example of this than 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure, which comes in ahead of more than half of our entries, yet provides the charmingly primitive experience you'd expect from a game quickly approaching its fortieth birthday. It may be difficult to grasp the importance of Colossal Cave Adventure without first knowing that no one had done anything like it before, despite how obvious its ideas may seem in retrospect. Though assembled as a simple diversion by a dad looking for a way to bond with his two daughters, the work of programmer William Crowther served as a direct inspiration to the first wave of game designers, whose influences we can trace further still.

Of course, Colossal Cave Adventure wouldn't have spread to the outside world without some help; Crowther originally developed his game for the PDP-10 mainframe computer, a monstrosity which looked like set dressing straight out of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew's Muppet Labs. But Crowther didn't design Colossal Cave Adventure for commercial sale (even if such a thing could happen in 1976), so friends passed it along during the early days of the Internet, where the few people with access to computers found themselves addicted without knowing just where this brilliant game came from. In the early '70s video games typically involved a car, spaceship, or ping-pong paddle set against a black void of nothingness, but Colossal Cave Adventure had players exploring an environment that they could map out for themselves -- inspired by Cowther's own knowledge of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave.

After discovering Crowther's program lurking within a computer at Stanford University's Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, Don Woods decided to add his own touches to Crowther's digital spelunking experience. Though the original programmer had an interest in Dungeons & Dragons (where he played a character known as "Willie the Thief"), Colossal Cave Adventure didn't offer the fantastical elements possible in the text adventure format. With the blessings of Crowther -- who he found by sending out a message to everyone on the Internet -- Woods expanded the original program, and distributed it among the few PDP-10 users around the world. This version received some much needed relevance that same year after being ported from the original FORTRAN to the much-friendlier C format, where it made its way to personal computers as "The Original Adventure."

36 years later, the piecemeal production of Colossal Cave Adventure makes for a more exciting tale than anything contained within the game itself. It's a pretty no-frills experience -- as should be expected from the first piece of interactive fiction -- yet the basic elements of adventure games are all there. Crowther's virtual cave tour includes simple navigation, puzzles, an inventory, and, in what would later be flagrantly co-opted by Sierra, an end-of-game point tally which shows just how well you've done on your travels. The husband and wife team of Ken and Roberta Williams later founded an entire studio on the ideas formed in Colossal Cave Adventure (which also brought into being a slew of fellow text adventures), with their first title Mystery House adding crude images to the established grammar of Crowther's game design. From there, the personal computer became a viable platform for games that sought to do much more than arcade action -- something that once differentiated them from dedicated gaming consoles -- and many developers tried their best to unseat Sierra from their adventure game throne during the '80s.

It makes perfect sense that a Dungeons & Dragons player would see video games as a means of telling a story; after all, that particular tabletop game showed you could weave a Tolkienesque and epic adventure out of math and graph paper alone. And to Dan Crowther, this fact seemed obvious; it's not like he ran out into the street to proclaim his creation after entering the last line of FORTRAN code. But thanks to this humble genius (and the few folks who found his creation), the world learned how text could transform gaming from a simple diversion to a medium full of complex spaces, waiting for us to poke and prod at their many moving parts.

Comments (5)

Haha

Yes, all ten of them! Still, a pretty great story and sounds downright ridiculous to consider in the modern day.

It reminds me when I was messing around with an email script in one of my Computer Science classes. I ended up sending multiple emails saying "Hello" to what an instructor told me was roughly a hundred people on campus! This event prompted more than a few angry responses.

Definitely a Lost Art

I've always enjoyed the possibilities that Interactive Fiction offers, and it's sad to see the genre essentially dead in the modern age. Indeed, I can't imagine how a style of game with no graphical support could survive in an era of multi-million dollar projects and an audience always clamoring for the latest, greatest thing, but it's fun to wonder.

I'm glad you pointed out

A key point about this this list. That this is NOT as list of the greatest games ever . The only problem I see with is list and it's methodology is that sometimes a lack or knowledge or exposure of an influential game can affect its placement. I have never heard of this this game. The fact that proffessionals contributed to this list helped it gain it's position it probably rightly deserves. But it also leads to some glaring ( at least in my eyes) issues. For example, do I feel that Super Mario Kart was influential, hell yes, do I think it was more influential than PSO. Quite possible if success of a series factors into anything. Do I think that Super Mario Kart is 50 places more influential than PSO with how it bought forth the era of online console connectivet with RPG's? Hell no. I attribut this to why not enough of the voters bei truly aware of what that game did. Yet strangely I feel this game was probably helped by the system you guys used to rank a game that probably a lot of people never heard of. I offer no solutions to this conundrum . Just merely point out that the list is not ideal because of it. That being said I am really enjoyin this quintet of influential games lists more so than most other online ranking lists I have read and am really looking forward to the rest.